I first encountered Chrissy Martin’s work while serving as a graduate assistant and editor for the minnesota review. When Martin’s poem, “Laying Hands,” landed in my assigned submissions queue, it immediately felt like the kind of work I wanted to bring to an acquisitions meeting. A devastatingly honest meditation on pain, disability, and belief, it had the potential to bring the whole issue together by representing the dichotomy between expectations of ability and the brutality of physical and mental pain. In Whole, Holy, Hot (Write Bloody Publishing), the poem provides a filter to view the rest of the book through by cultivating a sense of complicated honesty about disability, faith, the body, and performance. 

 

Whole, Holy, Hot examines the potential that mental illnesses and physical disabilities have to remove us from the world and the things we love, the things others expect of us. In the same way D/Annie Liontas writes about a deeply changed relationship to ability and health after experiencing a TBI in their memoir, Sex with a Brain Injury, Martin writes about the physical and mental conditions that force her to miss out on dancing, on getting coffee with a friend, on movement, on opportunities to celebrate and commune with the able bodies of others. At the same time, many of the poems in the collection are also intentional celebrations of the new avenues for being that are created when the speaker makes accommodations for herself, easing pain, discomfort, and anguish in a way that works for her body and mind, like the way “As Long As I Have Hands I Will Decorate Myself” thinks about adornment as a way to cultivate joy and create beauty. Martin writes: “Can’t shake depression / but I can plug holes with hearts that dangle / to my neck like a head on my shoulder.” 

 

While working for the minnesota review and trying to devote small scraps of time to my own writing, I was also sorting through the way my graduate school experience was stoking debilitating symptoms of depression, anxiety, and neurodivergence. I had avoided taking these symptoms seriously at the risk of turning myself into the embodiment of a 2012 Tumblr post punctuated with a black-and-white GIF. I was highly attuned to popular narratives surrounding mental illness in the same way Martin’s poems are attuned to narratives about physical illness and disability. The poems in Whole, Holy, Hot are vividly privy to the way pop culture infects our psyches and informs our perceptions of our maladies, our histories, and ourselves. As Martin explores depictions of disability in reality TV and pop culture, poems like “Centerfolds” challenge deep-rooted exclusion and infantilization of disabled women.

 

Opening this poem, the speaker describes a scene from The Bachelor in a way that causes discomfort, secondhand embarrassment: “For the first deaf contestant, / Bachelor Matt spits his S’s, mouths words wide, awards her / first impression rose for being vulnerable, being a fighter.” In the same vein, poems like “Blame it on the Edit” and “When Mary From The Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City Told Jen She Smelled Like Hospital” investigate the way reality TV skews what is factual for the sake of entertainment. The latter dives deep into the perceived—almost laughable—“extravagance” of the Real Housewives, noting that this extravagance, in Mary Cosby’s case, might not have stemmed solely from a vain “refusal / to be smelled.” The poem notes: “The show / leaves out Mary’s autoimmune disease that attacks / its own moisture glands, the boils covering her body / before twelve surgeries. I am not laughing anymore.”

 

Throughout the collection, organized religion operates in opposition to attempts at feeling whole. Disability, performance, and gender in relation to Christianity are explored throughout several of the poems in Whole, Holy, Hot. “Confessional” considers accessibility and religious practices: 

 

I thought of my father 

puffing up from pain meds 

spine too crushed to come sit 

for the car ride or church pew 

praying at the altar requires 

the ability to ground-sit

 

While “What They Say About Pastor’s Kids” considers the tireless work of adhering to gendered expectations within a church: “At sixteen, I haven’t learned what dresses are / church-appropriate and how much high heel or shown skin / delicate cardigans can fix.” The direct harm that stems from religious expectations for performance becomes especially evident at the end of the poem, when a traveling faith healer declares a limping teenager being forced to walk quickly “a miracle.” Martin’s poems—contextualized by religion and reality TV alike—interrogate what it means when characters strive for belonging by battling through or ignoring pain and discomfort, particularly through a careful mimicry of health and ability.

 

Books like Whole, Holy, Hot are a crucial antidote for counteracting a culture that is obsessed with appearing well, up for anything, and always able to participate—often at the cost of actual rest and healing. When we are visibly sick, we still attend the meetings, the conferences, the classes, the gym sessions that are too important to miss. When a job is pushing us toward a mental break, we show up, show up, and show up again because quitting is a sign of weakness. We wear shoes that treat our feet like gelatin in molds—the feat of standing, walking, and dancing in high heels is proof of our excellent health, our ability to overcome pain, our ability to be people. Many of Martin’s poems point out the clear absurdity of these kinds of performances, as the speaker of “Flare” states that she is “getting older and less open to trading pain for beauty” and “Ode to Willow Pill’s Flip Flops” says that “Beautiful shoes are beautiful but mean / extra meds, brush of elevator button, / mean so little dancing.” In these moments, the reality of pain is addressed, rather than suppressed for the sake of appearance norms and long-held facades. 

 

During grad school, I would climb back into my car at the end of a day of teaching and attending classes and think I can’t do this. My brain doesn’t work this way. I. Can’t. Do. This. This went on for months as I attempted to cope with what had been so much easier for me during my four previous years of undergrad; going to class, socializing with peers, entering and navigating unfamiliar spaces, receiving feedback on my writing. It was so difficult to allow myself to accept that my mental illness was encroaching on and impeding my ability to function; that improving my quality of life would depend on being medicated, attending therapy, and seeking out accommodations. In “Laying Hands,” the speaker says that asking her mother to give her rides and make breakfast while she experienced migraines and the side-effects of antidepressants was the equivalent of asking for “the impossible.” This was how it often felt to be asked to do what I was meant to do as a student, graduate assistant, and instructor. It was impossible for me to understand how those around me could complete the same kinds of tasks, then go out for drinks, see each other on the weekends, and write their poems, essays, novel fragments, and short stories. How was everyone else not completely depleted by the environment we were in?

 

In “Fourteen-Day Follow Up,” Martin writes: 

 

I like the term mental illness because it makes 

this treatment sound right as rain. I think I am 

not supposed to say mental illness, so I won’t 

use it for others but save it for myself. I am 

proud of these new pills, mostly because I am 

proud of myself for finally telling someone my 

head is so loud. Sometimes now I sit in quiet 

and can hear the sound of it, of nothing.

 

These lines remind me of the few months during which I enjoyed the revelation of being medicated. Things became a little easier, a little softer. It almost felt as if life had put on a pair of soft cotton gloves to handle me with. When I lost my health insurance and could no longer afford to see a psychiatrist and therapist, I also lost contact with this sense of quiet, the “nothing” that had felt so revolutionary after I acclimated to my new medication. Martin grapples with this sense of instability and loss as “Five Hundred-Day Follow-Up” asks: “why I can never find the / stillness of the pill when new. Why, when in / bed, my head flickers like televisions, car stereos / swinging from signal to signal.” 

 

As Whole, Holy, Hot creates a space for its speaker to attend to herself, the poems make it clear that healing can happen when we refuse to pretend that we are well, when we refuse to perform ability for those who demand the impossible, who “don’t know how to talk / about illness,” who convince us to view our own bodies and minds as resilient machines. The collection acknowledges the needs that a body can have; the fact that a body can’t always be easily diagnosed and repaired. The poem “Four-Week Follow-Up” asks: “Like conjoined twins, how / much do my illness and I share? Is it a thin clip / of elbow skin, or are we filling the same lungs?” These are the lines that continue to surface for me. At times, it feels like my depression, anxiety, autism, and I are treating my body like a quadruple-booked hotel room. We stumble over each other to get to the coffee machine, the mini fridge, the mildewed shower in the bathroom. We fight over what to watch on television—a nature documentary, Jersey Shore reruns, a movie so sad that we’ll be unable to think for the rest of the night. At some point, in the middle of this arguing, we merge into one being. We decide on complete darkness to soothe a sensitivity to the world. We fill and refill the same pair of lungs over and over again. 
 

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